Given renewed conflict on the Korean peninsula would be catastrophic beyond belief it is to be hoped President Trump will continue to wind back the rhetoric in his war of words with Kim Jong-un.
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Brinkmanship with monomaniacal dictators who are armed to the teeth, whether they be the Kaiser, Adolf Hitler or Saddam Hussein, rarely ends well.
Australia, an ally of South Korea's for almost 70 years and home to one of the largest expatriate South Korean communities on earth, has more skin in this game than most.
South Korea, which would bear the full force of any North Korean retaliation in response to a unilateral American strike on its nuclear facilities, is our fourth largest trading partner. It took almost $20 billion worth of Australian goods, raw materials and services in 2015-2016.
While coal and iron ore, at $4.6 billion and $3 billion respectively, accounted for lion's share of our exports, Australian farmers sold Seoul more than $1.3 billion worth of beef.
South Korea was Australia's second largest source of refined petroleum products, running a close second to Singapore, with sales of almost $5 billion.
This country's now effectively non-existent domestic refinery capacity and our dependence on diesel and petrol for our transport network was identified as a major national security issue as recently as last year.
Any conflict in which South Korea's refineries were targeted and oil shipments through the South China Sea and the Malacca and Singapore straits were threatened would shut down our economy in weeks.
While this may sound far fetched, the reality is North Korea, thanks to its paranoid and unstable leadership, is a threat orders of magnitude greater than anything since the end of World War II.
While Saddam may, or may not, have had chemical and biological weapons, North Korea has between 2,500 and 5,000 tonnes of them. The biological agents include anthrax, smallpox and the plague.
While Iran is reportedly still working behind the scenes to acquire at least one viable nuclear bomb, Kim Jong-un is understood to have at least 20.
Analysts fear in the event a U.S. "surgical strike" managed to wipe out North Korea's entire nuclear arsenal, the possibility initially talked up by President Trump, Kim Jong-un would respond with a hail of chemical, biological and conventional explosives horror on Seoul, the world's fourth richest city with more than 10 million people.
It is estimated at least 130,000 people would die within the first two hours. This would then escalate into a full scale war potentially involving the two Koreas, the U.S. and its allies, including Australia and Japan, and the Chinese who have a defence pact with North Korea that dates back to Chairman Mao.
With China now honouring U.N. sanctions against North Korea and offering to guarantee the rogue state's national security if it relinquished its nuclear weapons Australia should be supporting Beijing's efforts to broker a peace.